CAMBRIDGESHIRE, England – In September 2006, Peterborough Community Church opened a brand new, 80,000-ft. building in the Cambridgeshire city it is named after. With a technical specification that would be the envy of many large theatres and live music venues, the inclusion of DiGiCo D5 and D1 consoles demonstrated that the church was committed to the future. Twenty months later, the building has a new name – KingsGate Community Church – and its technical team has had many months of using the DiGiCo consoles.
“When specifying the system, our intention was to make it easy for people to understand the church’s message, for it to be simple for them to join in and to feel part of it. Great sound and great vision are all part of that,” says KingsGate technical director Pete Charlton.
“The truth is that every time I finish an event, it’s been great. The technical side has been so smooth and the DiGiCo consoles play a huge part in that. I’m still continually impressed with the technical facilities we have.”
The church has a team of eight sound operators. All are volunteers and none has any pro audio experience, but despite the initial learning curve being steep, the intuitive DiGiCo user interface ensured that they were quickly up to speed.
“It was a huge leap for them to go from a standard analogue console – which we were using before – to a much more complex system,” says Pete. “But the consoles helped them grasp the basic concepts very quickly, which make services and the other events we host run very smoothly.
“Over the past few months, they have been learning much more (in terms of the extra bells and whistles), which is where the DiGiCo consoles really come into their own with facilities like snapshots, the scope for using different mixes for different songs within the same service, or when worship leaders change during services. They’re getting used to those facilities now, which take our services to a whole new technical level. And everything we save is recalled absolutely accurately!”
Music is a fundamental part of KingsGate services, with two bands performing on alternate weeks, so the console’s snapshots facility is becoming increasingly important.
“Having set up basic mixes for each band, each week that particular band is playing, we build on the mix, tweaking it, getting better as time goes on. We’re using the consoles to build and improve the sound all the time,” says Pete.
“We also have three or four big events each year, where we have guest worship leaders and musical performers,” he continues. “At those events there are four major services over a weekend and our aim is to repeat the production as close to the rehearsals as possible.
“To achieve that we use AV Stumpfl Wings Platinum media control software. It runs SMPTE timecode and sends Midi Machine Control (MMC) messages to fire snapshots on the DiGiCo consoles, which ensure that all setting changes for the audio and visuals are perfectly in synchronisation.
“Currently the lighting isn’t triggered by the system. Achieving that is our next aim, but there’s only so much you can learn at once!” he smiles.
Most importantly, the technical facilities are also playing a big part in corporate clients choosing KingsGate as a venue.
“High quality facilities attract high quality clients,” says Pete, simply. “The fact that we can technically facilitate cutting edge presentations with no hassle is very significant to attracting more corporate use of the building.”
And it is this ‘no hassle’ factor that he most appreciates in the DiGiCo consoles.
“To choose equipment a couple of years before you actually need it, to convince people to spend a significant amount of money, to implement it and then for it to perform exactly as you anticipated is superb,” Pete concludes.
“The DiGiCo consoles work just like I wanted them to. They get a lot of use, but they don’t glitch or fall over. They are able to do everything we want and more. And, in addition, we know that they are a sound long-term investment.”
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